Willie Nelson’s salute to America’s small farmers on Sunday night was circuslike: it included American Indian wisdom dancers, a few marines, a talented practitioner of the stumpf fiddle (a bouncing stick with noisemakers attached), two of his children and about a dozen guitarists onstage at the same time, including Neil Young and Derek Trucks.
Willie Nelson, joined by his Farm Aid co-founder Neil Young (in baseball cap), during the finale.
Farm Aid — which came to Randalls Island on Sunday, and to New York City for the first time ever in its 22 years — is principally Mr. Nelson’s baby, and he used his closing set to put on something different and possibly less desirable than his usual show. It’s impossible to know, but one suspects that many in the crowd may have spent their ticket money —from $52 to $1,502 — on the performers rather than the cause. So some of the performers took on a tricky job: making the crowd understand that the day wasn’t really about music.
For most of the day’s 21 acts, donating their services, that sense was imposed on them by 30-minute set limits. Earlier in the day several acts left the stage without saying, “Thanks” or “New York, we love you” or even “Save the family farm”; that’s an exercise of ego that eats up audience time better spent browsing more organic-farm literature.
Of which there was an impressive tonnage. Besides educational booths — one was a mock market, in which you loaded up your bag with fruits and vegetables, brought it to a register, and were given the total number of miles the food had traveled — there were stands selling organic-farm variations on standard festival fare, like flatbread pizza, Brooklyn-roasted coffee made with fair-trade beans, and pork-chop sandwiches from Patchwork Family Farms in Missouri.
Naturally, for a New York audience, the statements from the stage were geared toward consumption, not cultivation. Mr. Young delivered a moseying acoustic set toward the end of the evening, accompanied mostly by his wife, Pegi Young, on guitar and vocals, and Ben Keith on dobro. They ran through gentle songs evoking a bucolic life like “Beautiful Bluebird,” “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” and “Four Strong Winds.” His speeches were calm, pointed and pedagogic, praising sustainable agriculture (“it lets the land renew itself, just like our brothers did who were here before us”) and criticizing the methods by which America has taken on the role of feeding the world.
By food standards nothing could touch the miracle of a fresh peach at a rock festival. But by music standards the Allman Brothers had it hands down. They played the first long set, near dusk, though it was only about an hour: short, by their standards, and therefore tremendously tight and intense, with both the band’s guitarists, Mr. Trucks and Warren Haynes, reaching heights of improvisation faster and more powerfully than they often do in three-hour shows.
Farm Aid has always emphasized American roots music — at least the rock, folk and country variations — and somehow that has come to mean having a Hammond organ sound in the band. (There’s something vaguely Midwestern about that sound: reassuring but not sweet, spiritual but not religious.) This trend carried through the Allmans’ stage show, of course, but also the Counting Crows, Mr. Trucks’s own band, and John Mellencamp’s too.
Mr. Mellencamp, whose lyrics and speeches hit hard on the idea of an America outside of strip malls and corporate boardrooms, played a few new songs from a forthcoming record produced with T-Bone Burnett, “Troubled Land” and “If I Die Sudden.” Alone with an acoustic guitar, he played “To Washington,” a song based on an old rural American folk-blues form, addressing new issues in the capital and in Iraq.
And Dave Matthews, hoarse but effectively so — “I broke the bone in my throat that makes it sound prettier,” is how he put it — played his songs accompanied only by the virtuosic guitarist Tim Reynolds, who put arcs of detail, rising and falling in volume, over the music.
The exhortations didn’t come only between songs. The refrain of Mr. Mellencamp’s “Troubled Land” was “bring peace to this troubled land”; the refrain of one of Mr. Nelson’s new songs, “A Peaceful Solution,” was “Let’s take back America.” In this context a fresh peach was political. But the most striking thing about Farm Aid was the novelty of going to a (more or less) rock festival focused not on outsiderness, fashion, derangement of the senses or even its own brand power, but on the survival of small businesses and the health of our species.
